861–870 of 1001 posts
Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users. Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roam…
This is wrong.
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There are many countries where debit cards are the norm and credit cards are extremely rare. In France, people are so afraid of consumer credit that cards are renamed ‘deferred debit cards’ rather than credit cards, otherwise people do not want them.
Growing up in the EU, living in North America now, it's mind blowing to me how much credit these companies are making available to me. Not that I ever would outside of an actual emergency but I can see how it's tempting to someone who didn't grow up in a financial risk averse society.
Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users. Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roam…
Never heard about this before, and I'm a German.
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What does Belgium's capital has to do with this? Do you imply Brussels = European Union?
This literary device is so common it has a name: synecdoche. e.g. "The pentagon" to refer to the US military. Now we just need a word for performative dense-ness.
If it's a French decision, you say "Matignon has done x" with Matignon being the home France's President. If it's local, you say "the mayor" , and if its European, you say Brussels.
In Canada, if it's federal, you say Carey's government, if it's provincial the name of the prime minister, or the name of the party and if its local, you use the mayor's name.
But in this situation, the ECB cited in the article is in Germany, not Brussels, with a high independence from the EU, but yes, with the Parliament in Brussels.
So I was downvoted because I asked why OP mentioned Brussels just to be sure that is wasn't the usual "eu bad" post.
Cunningham's law in action I guess.
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>No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device? Because the US or Chine government can't harm me in Europe via the data they collect from me, But the EU authorities can if they want to, so naturally I fear them more if they were the ones hoovering my data. What are the odds they're using this on-shore tech…
> What about being required to carry a your-own-government-controlled tracking device? What part of the cellphone manufacturer being based overseas makes you think the government can't track you via it? Even leaving asides 5-eyes style data-sharing agreements, your US/Chinese smartphone still connects through a domestic cellphone carrier, using a domestic number. That's enough to have at a minimum fine-grained locati…
Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone. Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from the…
Cards are really slow and expensive to distribute and (tech forward) people would also prefer to just use their phone or watch. This is the kind or project that will take years to work and almost everybody now has a smartphone on one of those two operating systems in their pocket every time they leave the house. Cards will have a slow demise over the next 10 years but it's coming whether we like it or not.
So I don't think distribution is a problem. Of course companies would prefer to save the cost, and they also prefer that you use their applications, but I just don't think it's more convenient for the end user. Taking a card with you is not a big deal while having to use a mobile application or approved device limits your freedom to choose which smartphone you want to use or how to use it.
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I had no idea visa/mc didn't bear the cost of fraud. I remember Paypal almost getting killed by fraud in the early days, and I always thought of Paypal as basically replicating visa/mc for online purchases. I didn't realize they were doing so much more than visa/mc by assuming fraud risk.
PayPal was a counterparty so if one side didn't pay or there was a dispute then PayPal was stuck in the middle. Visa and MC are just payment networks and have minimal risk. The only risk I think would be criminal liability (handling drug money) or maybe if the bank goes bankrupt before the payment is due to the merchant (but even that might be borne by they merchant - not sure).
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The odds are very low. It all depents on the people. So far, the European citizens are very privacy senstive. The European institutions are characterized by a huge devision of power. There is no chance that European instutitions can impose their will against a considerable majority of people. If people turn away from liberal democracy, that's another matter. But then everything is lost anyway.
35 years ago, a good chunk of the current EU was under a Soviet-imposed totalitarian rule. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975. And it's been just 80 years since WWII. It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. Meanwhile, many people in the US are convinced that the government will be coming for them any minute now.
There's a divide between generations and geographies to start with. Younger vs. older generations see things differently. Westerners vs. Easterners (especially those who remember the communist times) see things differently.
It's very hard to say what many and most people are doing on either side of the Atlantic. Until a few short years ago you wouldn't have imagined enough Americans would vote for the leader they did, knowing exactly what they're getting, and yet they did. So people aren't always forthcoming about their views and beliefs.
In Europe for anyone who can't remember the "hard times" it's easy to fall into the trap of believing things will stay good forever. The US hasn't had equivalent "hard times" relative to the rest of the world for as long as any person in the US has been alive and a few generations more. So they too can easily believe things can't turn sour, which is why this recent and swift downturn caused so much shock and consternation. But the US also always had a lot of preppers and people "ready to fight the Government" (that's why so many have guns, they say). It's a big place so you expect to have "many" people like this.
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Interesting. I don't think there's anything similar here in Spain, though. On the other hand, in this same thread, somebody said Visa acquired that "Carte Bleue" system, and Wikipedia states it was discontinued in 2010. So maybe it's not possible to use anything other than visa/mc in France anymore
You mention an interesting thing I didn't realize before. Carte Bleues, the brand, seems to have been sold to Visa but CB, the payment system would still be a separate thing and now mean Carte Bancaire. It is not helped by the fact that french people literally adopted carte bleue as a generic name for payment cards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CB_Bank_Card_Group
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The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).
You're saying nothing concrete in particular. What rules? How do they inhibit change? The only thing I can think of which is actually difficult to change is the echr and i see more than a dozen mostly liberal governments queueing up to change it (to little effect so far) over migration issues.